In his "Holy War"
John Bunyan's spiritual acumen is rarely more impressive than in
that point in the enemy's strategy to capture Mansoul where he
orders that Mr. Understanding - the Town Clerk - must be put in a
dark dungeon where he cannot see what is going on. The Apostle
Paul has given us no small emphasis upon the importance and value
of spiritual understanding, and the New Testament contains a
great deal of evidence as to that importance. Would to God that
we - His people - were more awake to the nature and meaning of
currents, trends, and happenings in our own time! David's kingdom
was strengthened in the day of its establishment after the death
of Saul by the men of Issachar "that had understanding of
the times". Our Lord's kingdom surely needs people so
endowed. The spheres in which this gift or quality is needed are
both those of the Lord's movements, and those of the enemy's, and
such perception would be a great strengthening to the Church and
the people of God. While we do not claim to be greatly endowed in
this way, there are some vital and big matters concerning which
no great illumination is necessary, and we venture to point these
out. For the moment we confine ourselves to only two, but two
which are very far reaching and inclusive of many more. The first
has to do with

The
Church

There is an almost astounding
movement in our time in this connection, and it has two major
aspects. The New Testament can be said to be - in a large
proportion of its contents - a document containing God's
conception, election, calling, and constitution of the Church for
its eternal vocation, and it can truly be said that God has bound
Himself to the Church in a very full and utter way. He has made
it clear that His means and method of fulfilling His
eternal counsels concerning His Son is 'Churchwise': that the
normal channel of His approach to and meeting of men is His
Church. Of course, this means the Church as constituted, indwelt,
and governed by His Son as "head over all things" to
it. This Divinely revealed and introduced Church all too soon
lost its original character and effectiveness, toward the end of
the apostolic age, and, for the most part, it has been other than
at the beginning ever since, with few worthy representations,
except here and there. But God has never abandoned His original
conception and appointment. Sooner or later it would be brought
home to Christendom that His way and means are indispensable to
its very survival. That time has now come! Never was there a time
when so many books were being published, and so many conferences
being held, on the subject of the Church as at this present time.
The matter is - perhaps - not even second to evangelism, for
evangelism resolves itself invariably into the Church question,
and is so largely determined as to its abiding value by it.

What we are going to mention is
not a verdict either way upon the World Council of Churches (here
we pass no judgment for or against, that is not our object at the
moment), but it is of no small significance that a body
representing almost every denomination of Christendom should make
the pronouncements that it has made.

In the great gatherings of this
body in Amsterdam the subject chosen was 'The Order of God and
the Disorder of Man'. This was afterward altered to 'Man's
Disorder and God's Design'. This was a reconsideration of the New
Testament revelation of the Church, and was a tacit condemnation
of the departure therefrom. Later this great body was found using
freely a phrase which has almost become a slogan: 'These man-made
divisions must go!' For centuries these 'divisions' have been
upheld and championed as part of the sovereign ways of God to
recover or preserve certain specific features of Divine truth. It
has been said again and again that the denominations were raised
up by God for this purpose (no matter how they contradicted one
another). Now it is 'these man-made divisions'. What lies
behind this change and new face? Nothing less and other than the
realisation that for its very survival and effective testimony
the Church must reassert its unity. While we do not for a moment
think that the kind of unity - or union - being aimed at or
worked for is what is in the New Testament, or will have any more
intrinsic value than a League of Nations or United (?) Nations,
we repeat that it is of no small significance that, as the age
closes in, God is compelling a recognition of His own established
way. While this may be the imposing of His decree upon the
recognition of men, there may be a hidden and deep-down working
of His sovereignty to have the genuine thing.

There is another aspect of this
matter. It is in the realm of

'World
Missions'

No one with any eyes to see can
fail to recognise that we have turned a very big corner in the
matter of what have been called 'World Missions'. This turn is
truly stated by one very competent to judge. Here are his words
(we quote them with certain reservations which we will later
mention):

"The missionary
movement stands at the beginning of a new age."
"Among enlightened individuals, for example, it is now
common to hear the term 'world mission of the Church' used
instead of the time-honoured phrase 'foreign missions'."
"The age of foreign missions has passed." "The
challenge of our day lies rather in a world-wide heathenism
running horizontally through all the religions, cultures, and
nations of the world, including our own." "Nothing
is foreign that concerns our mission to take Christ to our
disordered world." "Then, also, we speak less of
'missions' today and more often of the 'world-mission'."
"The transition from the plural to the singular is
important." "...the word 'missions' in the plural
suggests many scattered enterprises, supported by churches
and individuals because of their concern for a particular
missionary or a specific type of work... in promoting these
enterprises we find ourselves exalting the incidental and the
subsidiary rather than the basic and the permanent. The
missionary faith at home cannot be nurtured on success
stories, for in some countries, at least, dark days lie ahead
- how dark we dare not even surmise..." "To go a
step further, this 'world-mission' is a world-mission of the church.
Missionary emphasis today is upon the church. We are
concerned with the mission of the church ... The modern
'rediscovery of the church', of which we read and hear so
much, was, in fact, largely a missionary achievement... It is
with the church as fellowship, rather than organisation, that
the missionary movement is concerned... Incorporation into
the fellowship is the end of conversion. A solitary believer
is an impossibility... Experience on the mission field has
demonstrated that the gospel is commended to unbelievers by
the corporate witness of the new life as lived within the
fellowship as a 'colony of heaven'. The church as fellowship
is not only the end of evangelism; it is the agent in that
process."

The above is no isolated
judgment and appraisal. Our point in this statement is that -
whether it be the Church of Divine revelation, or of man's
conception - it is the fact of the Church that is finding an
altogether new and primary place in the realm of Christian
concern. This, we repeat, is very significant, and ought
to be considered seriously in the light of Divine sovereignty, as
displacing both individualism and institutionalism. There is a
particular aspect of this to which our evangelical leaders in
particular will do well to take heed. We quote here from another
work for the sake of getting to the point quickly.

"All through the
Christian age a minority of believers has endeavoured to
carry out in corporate lifethe Scriptural
principles (i.e. of Church life and work). The
bitterest and most implacable opposition has come to them,
not from the world, but from organised Christendom, that is,
the system men call the Church. By this powerful organisation
they have been in turn oppressed, misrepresented, persecuted,
reviled, ridiculed, and ignored, but their persistence from
century to century has supplied proof of the practibility of
the principles they professed."

The present writer has recently
spent some time in the East and the Far East and has seen the
glory and the tragedy of the above.

On the one hand a mighty work
of God - not on a 'mission' or institutional basis at all, but on
the true and pure basis of the Church - is expressing itself and
reproducing itself as shown in the book of the 'Acts', reaching
far and wide until churches have been born in many hundreds of
places (literally true), with large numbers of fulltime workers,
and an order beautiful to behold, a joy that bows one to worship.
One thanks God for ever having been allowed the honour of seeing
just a part of this work, from the inside, and of being able to
look deeply into its constitution. This is something actually in
existence and still going on today. But on the other hand, this
is the work that has had more opposition in misunderstanding,
misrepresentation, criticism, and avoidance on the part of
organized Christianity, than any other Christian activity. 'Christians'
have even gone so far as to boycott in business those who have
been associated with this work. It is happening today, but the
most evident seal of God is on this testimony.

This leads us to our second
main word in this editorial. It has to do with this increasing
and blighting

Suspicion
Among Christians

Error, false teaching, and
heresy have always been a major means by which the Devil has
sought to destroy "the testimony of Jesus", but when he
brought in the weapon of what is known as 'Modernism', or 'Higher
Criticism', he used a double-barrelled gun. One barrel he aimed
directly at the great fundamental truths of the Person of Christ,
the work of Christ, and the authority of the Bible. He has thus
wrought great havoc, but one wonders whether even that is
comparable to the mischief of his second and closely related
barrel. By it he has poured out volumes and clouds of suspicion,
fear, mistrust, apprehension, and all the grievous effects of
these among true Christians. There is not a single person today
who is quite safe in this 'Christian' world and atmosphere. Some
of the most outstanding and erstwhile evangelical stalwarts have
at length fallen under its awful miasma, and died of a broken
heart because of it - and all so untrue! The enemy stops short at
no point short of dividing the last two Christians, and if he
cannot find true ground for doing it by spreading suspicion and
mistrust - "evil report" - he will make it by giving a
twist to anything that is capable of being twisted. It is like an
evil disease, a blight, a cancer, working in the very system of
Christianity, and because of it the Church can never be true to
the glorious definition:-

"Fair as the moon,
Clear as the sun,
Terrible as an army with banners."

God only knows what He is
losing by this, and what capital Satan is making out of it! God
forbid that there should ever be compromise with false teaching
and error, but is not the predisposition to suspicion, the
capitulation to a spirit of mistrust, and a mentality which is
all on the alert for something doubtful, being carried too far,
to the destruction of the Church's authority and unity?

We beg to appeal to all those
to whose eyes this message may come, that they will ask the Lord,
if need be, to completely convert their mentality in this matter.
Would it not be more according to the spirit of the Master, who
said "Let him that is without sin cast the first
stone", and "He that is not against us is for us",
if, as our instant reaction to every 'report', 'rumour',
criticism, judgment, insinuation, innuendo, or whisper, we
instantly asked the question, Is it true? Did the speaker - or
writer - really mean that? Is there not another meaning to be
given to it? Is it not - perhaps - an unfortunate way of putting
it, but not necessarily pernicious? Should we not, before
accepting it, find out whether our interpretation is the right
one, or whether we may be mistaken?

Whatever value
there may have been, or may be, in the meticulous custodianship
of 'soundness' which some have assumed - and we do owe much to
those who have been eyes to the Church when there has really been
something to see that threatened The Faith - the Lord has
suffered, and His people have suffered, far more from the
ultra-critical and suspicious and fearful than from many other
more open assaults upon the truth. The enemy is engaged more than
ever upon a campaign of sabotage within the Church for its
internal disintegration, and it is for us to resist him by
seeking all the positive ground of fellowship possible,
not looking for all the negative ground, either really or
imaginatively existent.

There are various ways of
approaching the matter of Christian unity. We have before
approached it in this paper along the line of Scripture, dealing
with its spiritual basis. Many books have been published and
articles written by various authors. Nothing seems to have had
much effect, but we venture to believe that such a change of
disposition as is here appealed for would go a very long way
toward rescuing the Church from its present weakness due to its
internecine strife and its civil war.

To return to our starting
point. Is it not a matter for real spiritual perception and
discernment that - at a time like this, at the end of the age -
the Church should be so largely crippled by an intensive campaign
of the evil forces to spread suspicion and doubt through all its
ranks, and by lies, halftruths, and misapprehensions to get the
Lord's people all looking at one another with questions and
uncertainties, so that they are totally unable to face a common
foe, and a great vocation, as one man in Christ?

First published in "A Witness and A
Testimony" magazine, May-June 1956, Vol 34-3